nightmares
by Fading Butterfly Wings
Summary: "Part of bravery is being afraid but still doing brave things anyway." Flik helps Dot as the little princess struggles to cope with the traumatic events of the past. Friendship fluff, three(ish)shot.


**Okay, this is a pretty big deviation from what I usually do, but **_**A Bug's Life **_**is my all-time favorite Pixar movie and the lack of love it gets on FanFiction and just in general makes me sad... so this is my attempt to remedy that. :D Anyway, Dot was always my favorite character and considering she was probably only five or six in human years during the events of **_**A Bug's Life**_**, she went through some pretty traumatizing stuff for a little girl. This is my take on how those things affected her (and also just an excuse for some DotFlik non-romantic friendship fluff. (: ) I wrote the whole story but it's going to be a three-shot I think because I'm anxious to upload it (and also too lazy to type it up all at once shhh.) Hope you enjoy the first part!**

**~Butterfly**

* * *

><p>She's running as fast as she can but the clovers under her feet sway with each step and she knows any second she's going to fall through them. She can hear him closing in on her, his heavy panting hot on the back of her neck, his shrieks of hunger and fury giving her goosebumps.<p>

"Bad grasshopper!" she tries to say, but her voice is stuck in her throat. Where is Dim to scare him away like last time?

And then a clover leaf slips from under her feet and she's falling and screaming and she's trying to pump her wings but for some reason she just can't get them to work right and she closes her eyes and waits for the ground to meet her…

…and finds herself in a pair of black arms.

"Francis!" she cries happily, burrowing into the chest of her ladybug friend. "Thank goodness you're here!"

Francis smiles down at her. "I gotcha, kid," he murmurs.

She knows she should feel safe now, but something about him feels horribly, horribly wrong. He's still giving her that smile, but something is off about it. His teeth are too sharp, his voice is too gravelly, and there's something about his right eye…

And then she's screaming and twisting in his arms because suddenly he's grown three inches and his red wings are brown and his soft fingers have sharp claws and he's holding her out in front of him and laughing and even though she wants to she can't stop looking at that eye, that one dead eye, glazed over like it's shrouded in fog with a cruel scar through the middle.

"What's the matter, you scared of grasshoppers?" he says with a cruel smirk, and she hears Thumper's demonic cackle behind her.

Slowly everything fades away and the next thing she knows she's standing on the edge of Ant Island. Like Hopper's eye the island is covered in a gray mist so thick that when she sticks her arm out it seems to disappear. It's quiet, eerily quiet, and again she can't ignore the sense of wrongness in her antennae.

Suddenly the unmistakable scent of ash fills her nose and she coughs so hard that tears well in her eyes. She jumps back as something orange and glowing drifts past her towards the sky, followed by another and another and another. There are hundreds of the strange orange shapes around her, and several moments go by before she realizes what they are.

Burning feathers.

She watches in a sort of horrified trance as the feathers float towards the sky like scattered pieces of a firebird, and then the heat on her face and the smoke filling her lungs and the desperate cries of the Blueberries ringing in her mind all just become too much.

She grabs her antennae in her hands, trying to block out the memories from that awful night. Eventually the feathers are swallowed by the flames and they turn to ash that crumbles in the air and plummets to the ground. It's beautiful and frightening at the same time.

A twig snaps behind her and she spins around to see four-armed shadows lumbering towards her. She's too terrified to scream or run or do anything but stand and watch as the grasshoppers come closer with every step, their beady eyes glistening even through the fog.

But they never reach her, because suddenly she feels sharp claws dig into her scalp and hoist her into the air and she's staring into that gray dead eye again. Even though she knows it's blind, it still seems to pierce right through her.

Hopper chuckles and begins moving forward, and she realizes with terror that he's heading right for the edge of the cliff. She squirms and kicks her legs, trying to free herself from the hand clamped around her head.

"Please let me go!" she begs the monster. Out of nowhere her mother appears over Hopper's shoulder, watching the scene with a grave expression on her wrinkled face.

Dot reaches her tiny arms out towards her and flaps her broken wings in vain. "Mom, help me!" she cries, but the Queen only shakes her head.

"Dot, what have I told you about trying to fly?" she says sadly.

She looks down and he stomach drops when she sees that her purple feet are dangling hundreds of inches above the dry, cracked earth below. She looks up and sees the grimace on Hopper's face slowly widen into a terrible grin.

He fixes his good eye on her and sneers, "So long, princess."

And then he lets go.


End file.
